Mobile Broadband Charging (MBC) solutions covers convergent data rating, charging and policy management providing operators with a platform for advanced real-time charging of data services along with policy control functions.
MBC implements functionality defined in the Online Charging System (OCS) as defined in 3GPP TS 32.240 V11.5.0 (2012-09). MBC also implements functionality defined in the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) as described in 3GPP TS 23.203 V11.8.0 (2012-12), this way creating a way of combining policy management and charging. MBC implements bearer quality of service (QoS) control as an integral part of rating. If during rating evaluation subscriber's subscription and/or temporary offers, subscriber's accumulated usage, day of week time of day, radio access type, equipment type, location or other parameter indicates that the QoS must be changed for this subscriber, MBC enforces the new QoS towards the packet core network.
Service aware charging and control solution provides for traffic inspection, charging, QoS management, content filtering and access policies.
Service aware charging and control includes capturing and analyzing the subscriber data traffic and performing charging and control functions. Subscriber traffic is obtained by defining a default gateway for intermediate network elements, both uplink and downlink.
The default gateway is deployed in the operator's IP network and captures the user and signaling traffic. By analyzing and classifying that traffic, the default gateway is aware of the subscriber's identity and the type of service being used, with no need for changes in either the subscriber terminals or the service platforms. The default gateway provides packet inspection and service classification where IP packets are classified into content types according to a configured rules, so that they are assigned to a particular service session. The default gateway may interact with an OCS for control of service sessions for online charged, e.g. prepaid subscribers.
With service based mobile broadband charging attractive pricing packages can therefore be provided to an end users giving access to a specific service. For example, pricing package such as access to Facebook for 1 day for the price of 3 EUR can be offered.
However, proper control of such services is troublesome in terms of service creation as the requested service often results in a response from the service providing system that includes references (e.g. web links) to other secondary sources.
A concrete example is facebook.com. It includes a lot of content from facebook.com—but it also includes “facebook applications” which may be HTML iframes loaded from secondary sources (with Uniform Resource Locators which are not related to facebook.com). These iframes are automatically loaded by the web browser. Such references could relate to images, advertisements, or other content. The user expects access to such references to be included in the price package but the default gateway is not able to distinguish this traffic from other traffic.
Present solutions also have limitations in terms of scalability as the capturing of, and analyzing, traffic by the default gateway requires costly processing capacity.